Gendered Organizational Culture in Child Protection Social Work (Practice UPDATE‪)‬

This Practice Update summarizes the findings of ethnographic research on child protection work in the United Kingdom. The focus of the research was on the gendered culture of a social work team. The findings have been published in detail elsewhere (Scourfield, 2003). The aim of this practice update is to introduce a U.S. social work audience to the research. The study was motivated by the concern over the tendency of child care social work to concentrate on working with women, and the relative failure to engage men. Researchers have noted this tendency in the United Kingdom (for example, Edwards, 1998; Farmer & Owen, 1995), Scandinavia (Kahkonen, 1999), Australia (Parton, Thorpe, & Wattam, 1997), Canada (Swift, 1995), and the United States (Davies & Krane, 1996; Edleson, 1998). Farmer and Owen's (1995) study of child protection practice in the United Kingdom showed that in two-parent families, the focus of intervention tended to switch from abusing father-figure to the mother and to general child care and support. O'Hagan and Dillenburger (1995) labeled this process "the abuse of women by avoiding men." They observed that this process is documented, explicitly or implicitly, in the majority of high-profile child death inquiries in the United Kingdom.